Comment by nashequilibrium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nashequilibrium | Hacker News Reader

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nashequilibrium

DuckDuckGo uses yahoo's search api which is powered by bing. Yahoo research has released the most innovative papers on search but nobody is there to take this from research to product. Instead you find google and bing implementing yahoo's research, its amazing the quality of stuff that comes from there. I also noticed that a few of yahoo's top researchers going to their rivals and then working on search. This is why i didn't believe in the Marissa Mayer hire but i am hoping for the best. She is taking yahoo from a company with high intelligence to being a more low level media company like AOL, therefore most of their talent is going to waste, there is so many products they could be pushing out. The billion they dropped on tumblr could have be used to fund all those researchers crazy ideas, give them 10mill each to build intelligent applications that makes peoples everyday life easier, instead of buying CRUD startups to reach this goal.

If you look at yahoo latest earnings most of their money is coming from the Alibaba investment and their hedging of the yen, which seems to have been used to help pay for tumblr. Yahoo cannot buy their way out of this, just like steve jobs could not buy Apples way out during the 90's instead they had to use their human capital and innovate their way out. I don;t know who should have led yahoo but i do know that their biggest strength was their human capital which is being wasted and marginalized. It's even more evident when your competitors are implementing the research successfully and going further.

There is a great Q&A with Steve Jobs (I can't find it right now), where he explains that you can't sell billions of dollars of product simply by building interesting (or useful) things -- you have to develop a coherent strategy and think through how different pieces fit together. Similarly, you can't jump dump $10m on a hundred research teams, and expect to turn Yahoo around.

I used to be in academia and I'm running a startup now. I'm absolutely certain that generating computer science research papers, even brilliant ones, is a heck of a lot easier than the absolutely insane focus required to ship breakthrough products.

From what I can tell, Yahoo now has a phenomenal environment for people with this level of focus. As for the castles-in-the-sky research people leaving Yahoo, it's probably better off for both the research people and Yahoo. It's got a new business to build -- funding research papers that go nowhere does nothing to advance that goal.

This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

For those not initiated, OpenDoc was a multimedia document format developed by Apple before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, which was when he violently killed OpenDoc.

Wish he was alive for a few more years :(

Killed it and allowed Microsoft to boss them around another couple of decades thanks to office monopoly. Google is now getting close to end this.

Google ending Microsoft Office's monopoly.

That's funny.

Honestly not unthinkable in this day and age. Maybe office becomes the corporate niche thing, and everyone uses g docs or a tablet/phone app at home.

I suspect an interpretation, if not grandparent's, is that one monopoly is being traded for another.

gdocs still has a long way to go. It's a harmless toy compared to Office, and I'm very far from being a power user.

Well, my place of work uses google drive exclusively. That's 60.000 people less paying office licenses for Microsoft...

This is the power of branding. Even if Yahoo came out with better search technology than Google, it would be incredibly difficult to unseat it now - you would need to be at least one order of magnitude better, like Google was compared to Altavista when it stole its crown. And even in that case Yahoo would need to use a different brand anyway (like Microsoft is trying to do with Bing)

Steve Jobs certainly had a keen eye for business. You can tell from interviews. Probably one of the greatest businessmen in tech. To me, it's his greatest legacy.

Which are those papers you are talking about? I would love to read them at some point. Do you have them at hand?

Edit: Here they are: http://www.research.yahoo.com/publication

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